The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,80

his belt and spins toward the oncoming men.

The burly, coiled Martinez pounces immediately, slamming the butt end of his M1 down on the butcher’s right wrist, the sound of delicate bones crunching audible above the wind. The Glock flies out of the butcher’s hand and the butcher lets out a mucusy howl.

One of the other guards—a black kid in an oversized hoodie—arrives in time to grab Lilly, pulling her away from the action. She writhes and squirms in the young man’s arms as the guard holds her at bay.

“Stand down, asshole!” Martinez booms, pointing the assault rifle at the staggering butcher, but almost instantly, before Martinez can react, the butcher gets his hands around the shaft of the carbine.

The two men grapple for the gun, their inertia driving them back into the flaming barrel. The barrel spills its contents, a swirl of sparks going up, as the twosome careens toward the storefront. The butcher slams Martinez into the glass door, glass cracking in hairline fractures as Martinez slams the gun up into the butcher’s face.

The butcher rears back in pain, clawing the M1 out of Martinez’s grip. The assault rifle flies off across the sidewalk. The old men scatter in terror, while other townspeople arrive from all directions, some of them already sending up a frenzy of angry shouts. The second guard—an older man in aviator glasses and ratty down vest—holds the crowd back.

Martinez delivers a hard right to the butcher’s jaw and sends the man in the apron crashing through the broken glass pane of the door.

The butcher lands inside the store’s vestibule, sprawling to the tile floor, which is littered with glass shards now. Martinez climbs in after him.

A barrage of punishing blows from Martinez keeps the butcher pinned to the floor, his spittle and blood flinging off in pink threads. Frantically shielding his face, flailing impotently, the butcher tries to fight back but Martinez overpowers the man.

The final blow—a roundhouse punch to the butcher’s jaw—knocks the man unconscious.

An awkward moment of silence follows, as Martinez catches his breath. He stands over the man in the apron, rubbing his knuckles, trying to get his bearings. The noise of the crowd outside the food center has grown to a dull roar—most of them cheering for Martinez—like a demented pep rally.

Martinez cannot figure out what just happened. He never much cared for Sam the Butcher, but on the other hand he cannot imagine what would have gotten into this prick to make him draw on Hamilton.

“What the fuck got into you?” Martinez asks the man on the floor, speaking somewhat rhetorically, not really expecting an answer.

“The man obviously wants to be a star.”

The voice comes from the gaping, jagged entrance behind Martinez.

Martinez whirls and sees the Governor standing in the doorway. Sinewy arms crossed against his chest, the long tails of his duster flapping in the breeze, the man has an enigmatic expression on his face, a mixture of bemusement and contempt and baleful curiosity. Gabe and Bruce stand behind the man like sullen totems.

Martinez is more confused than ever. “He wants to be a what?”

The Governor’s expression transforms—his dark eyes glittering with inspiration, his handlebar mustache fully grown in now and twitching around the corners of a frown—which tells Martinez to step lightly. “First,” the Governor says in a flat, impassive tone, “tell me exactly what happened.”

* * *

“He didn’t suffer, Lilly … remember that … no pain … he just went out like a light.” Bob crouches near the curb next to Lilly, who is slumped with her head down, the tears dripping onto her lap. Bob has his first-aid kit open on the sidewalk next to her, and he is dabbing a swab of iodine on her cut face. “That’s more than most of us can hope for in this shithole of a world.”

“I should have stopped it,” Lilly utters in a bloodless, sapped voice that sounds like a pull-string doll on its last legs. She has burned out her tear ducts. “I could have, Bob, I could have stopped it.”

The silence stretches, the wind rattling in the eaves and high-tension wires. Practically the entire population of Woodbury has gathered along Main Street to gawk at the aftermath.

Josh lies supine under a sheet next to Lilly. Someone covered the body with the makeshift shroud only minutes earlier, the folds of which now soak with red blotches of blood from Josh’s head wounds. Lilly tenderly strokes his leg, compulsively squeezing and massaging as though she might wake him